Lecture 27: Romantics, Vegetarians, Utopians
against mass-manufactured food that they believed harms your
body and costs more. Vegetarianism began to spread, along with the idea that dramatically
restricting your diet could improve your health, cleanse your
system, and cure all sorts of new and fashionable diseases that were
brought on by, ironically, eating too much. This fi rst antimodern society health-food movement began to
appeal to wealthy women and men as a kind of curative regimen
to counteract the rich and heavily meat-and-alcohol-laden diet that
they normally enjoyed. In other words, they would take vacations to
elite spas, eat vegetables and drink mineral water for a few weeks,
and get enemas and massages. Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, of these religiously inspired
food-reform leaders was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, whose sanitarium
in Battle Creek, Michigan, offered curative retreats for sick and
stressed Seventh-day Adventists. Kellogg was up on the latest
science, and it was just at this time that people were beginning to
understand the role of intestinal fl ora in digestion. There are actually
bacteria in your gut that help you digest food. You can kill them
accidentally (with strong antibiotics), but you can also promote them
with foods like yogurt with live lactobacillus cultures. Kellogg said that people eat too much meat and not enough
vegetables, which have roughage and promote intestinal fl ora. He
had visitors to the sanitarium eat very plain vegetables and no spices,
alcohol, or stimulants. They were usually patients suffering from
stress-related disorders, and the assumption was that all of these food
tightened the body and increased stress while plain food relaxed the
sinews. In 1877, he came up with a cereal he called granula, but he
was sued and was forced to change the name to granola. Kellogg’s brother Will Keith marketed granola and another product
he had developed, called cornfl akes, in neat packages, advertised
them well, and basically sold them to the entire nation. What